Without question, the buzzword in the waste and resources industry at the moment is ‘circular economy’. Everybody’s talking about it, singing its praises and declaring it is, undoubtedly, our future. But what would a circular economy actually look like? And, apart from all the talk, what is being done to bring it about?

To be sure, the concept of a circular economy is not new, and many similar or complementary ideas have also been circulating (forgive the pun) for a long time – although they, evidently, do not capture the imagination as readily as the idea of circularity seems to. As SITA UK’s Gev Eduljee writes in the introduction to Green Alliance’s ‘Reinventing the Wheel’ report: ‘There are some strong conceptual models to underpin decision-making for sustainable development (zero waste, cradle to cradle, industrial ecology, responsible stewardship for example) but the imagery conjured by the “circular economy” is perhaps the most powerful and the most amenable to policy development.’

These other concepts that Eduljee mentions, as well as the idea of the ‘blue economy’, have rich histories of their own: the term ‘zero waste’ entered the public domain in the 1970s with the creation of the company Zero Waste Systems in California, and more recently, the idea has been thoroughly embraced by countries like Wales and Scotland; the circular design term ‘cradle to cradle’ (as opposed to the linear ‘cradle to grave’) has again been around since the 1970s, and was comprehensively described in the 2002 manifesto Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things by Michael Braungart and William McDonough (who contributed an article on designing for reincarnation to the first ever Resource in 2000!); in a 1989 Scientific American article, scientists Robert Frosch and Nicholas Gallopoulos presented a vision of an ‘industrial ecology’ where ‘our industrial system behave[s] like an ecosystem, where the wastes of a species may be a resource to another species’; and lately, Gunter Pauli (interviewed in the last issue of Resource) has been promoting the idea of a ‘blue economy’, which again looks to ecosystems to learn how to do away with waste.

And yet, it’s ‘circular economy’ that currently has the rhetorical momentum at least. Stuart Greig, Head of Zero Waste Policy at the Scottish Government, noted in the debate on the circular economy at the CIWM conference this June that we “are at risk of drowning ourselves in rhetoric”, concluding: “We need a mindset change – just calling waste a resource and treating it just the same is not a mindset change.” And while this may be true, there are at least some influential players out there who are attempting to define the concept and determine how to bring it about.

Defined by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation as ‘a generic term for an industrial economy that is, by design or intention, restorative and in which materials flows are of two types, biological nutrients, designed to reenter the biosphere safely, and technical nutrients, which are designed to circulate at high quality without entering the biosphere’, the circular economy is best understood in contrast to the ubiquitous linear model of ‘take, make, dispose’. In this model, natural resources are extracted, manufactured into items that are used and then disposed of – largely through landfill or incineration – at their end of life. This economy is now so engrained in the developed world and is so complicated that it will be very difficult to change, but with increasing concern over resource scarcity and security, impetus is growing.

I ask Julie Hill, co-author of the aforementioned ‘Reinventing the Wheel’ report and Chair of Green Alliance’s Circular Economy Taskforce, what is going on to bring about a circular economy, and she sums up the aims of the taskforce: “The taskforce will try to move the circular economy on in practical terms, in the sense that what we’re doing is looking at experience to date because our mode is to work with companies and to draw out of their experiences what’s really going on – what have they tried to do, what’s worked, what hasn’t worked, what they see as the barriers and opportunities.” Working with companies including Boots, Unilever and Veolia, the taskforce will publish a report on its first phase this summer (look out for a summary of the findings in Resource’s next issue).

Hill also highlights important work being done by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, which she says has been responsible “for a lot of the good economic modelling work” highlighting the benefits of a circular economy. Indeed, the foundation has made some compelling economic arguments in favour of circularity, with its second ‘Towards the Circular Economy’ report, published early this year, indicating that the consumer goods sector alone could save a whopping US$700 billion (£455 billion) by adopting a circular economy. What’s more, many of the ways in which savings can be made seem fairly straightforward: the UK alone could potentially generate US$1.5 billion (£976 million) just by collecting and processing its household food waste;
and reusing textiles could result in global material savings of US$71 billion (£46 billion), for instance.

And then of course there’s the work of Oakdene Hollins and the Centre for Remanufacturing & Reuse (CRR), an organisation that embodies many of the ideals that a circular economy will require. Remanufacturing and other forms of reuse are, of course, higher up the waste hierarchy than recycling, and so should be more important to the coming circular economy. Ben Walsh, Manager of the CRR, pointed this out succinctly at the CIWM conference this year when he noted the importance of looking at whole products rather than simply materials: “You’ve lost if you’re talking about materials, because you lose all the embedded energy”, he noted. To ensure that businesses are able to reuse electronic products wherever possible rather than simply breaking them down for their parts (and usually losing quite a lot of material – as well as energy – along the way), the centre has developed PAS 141, a public standard to ensure used electronic and electrical items are suitable for reuse; this will hopefully create more of a market and deter illegal exports of electronics.

Another piece of the puzzle – the design element – is being tackled by the RSA and its Great Recovery Project. There’s an oftcited, but evidently poorly-substantiated, figure that claims that 80 per cent of a product’s environmental impacts are determined at design stage, and whether or not you trust the exact figure, it’s easy to understand the influence of design. Sophie Thomas, Project Director of The Great Recovery, explains: “If designers don’t have the knowledge that would inform them in a way to think about the post-user stage, you wind up with a lot of consequences happening at the recovery stage. And that’s what we’re seeing a lot of at the moment because when you get to the end-of-life stage it’s so complex because everything that comes through the doors of a recovery facility is different.”

Indeed, many new technologies hailed as innovative design advancements, such as LCD screens and composite materials, are actually a nightmare from an end-of-life perspective. LCD televisions are the fastest growing item of electronic waste in the EU (and we all know there’s a lot of electronic waste coming out of our gadget-hungry society!), according to ‘Reinventing the Wheel’. And while liquid crystal displays may sound awfully fancy and look wonderfully stylish and practical on our walls, they pose a number of headaches at end of life: their different design configurations make automated disassembly impractical; they often contain mercury (and rarely are appropriately labelled in this regard); they use different adhesives, making it difficult to separate components; and it’s not economically viable to extract some of the valuable metals the screens contain.

Both Hill and Thomas insist that if we’re going to prevent this sort of short-sighted design in future “it’s system design that counts”. Hill elaborates: “You’ve got to design the products with end-of-life recovery treatments in mind… it shouldn’t mean taking today’s product configurations and working out complicated end-of-life solutions if there’s a better way of designing the product. And equally, it shouldn’t mean end-of-life solutions into which you shoehorn specific products. The things should be done together.”

In addition to ensuring that end-oflife criteria be written into design briefs, another key step will be to ensure sustainability is at the heart of design education, something that isn’t the case at the moment, as Thomas explains: “A lot of our recommendations have to do with skilling up the design industry. We really did find that there’s a whole lot of enthusiasm, but actually, there are very few institutes putting it right at the heart of the curriculum. It’s very much still an add-on module where you say ‘Oh yeah, by the way, think about sustainability.’”

Thomas indicates that communication between different actors – in the educational sphere and design world itself – will be key to creating circularity: “There should be much more crosscurriculum learning, so designers must talk to chemists, must talk to resource managers, must talk to manufacturers”, she says. To this end, The Great Recovery has created a ‘Circular design map’ that takes into account four different ways of designing that “sit within circularity”: design for longevity; design for service; design for reuse in manufacture; and design for material recovery. Thomas describes the diagram as a “decision tree” for determining who needs to be involved in the design briefing stage: “It maps outall the different ways that you can design in terms of sustainability and then maps in all the different co-creation groups, the people that you consult with throughout the design process.” So, if you’re designing something to be used in a service system, the relationship between the brand/ company and the consumer/user is very important, for instance.

All this won’t happen straight away, of course, and the type of product will determine how quickly circularity can become a reality. “Things that are already quite fast moving may well have the ability to adapt quite quickly, things that are slow moving much less so”, Hill explains. “We’ve seen a lot of intellectual advancement on things like buildings, but of course running that through the system takes an awfully long time because buildings have such long lifespans.”

Thomas adds: “Ideally, it should be a transformational shift towards circularity, but in reality, it’s going to be a step change. I expect that when you start really looking into supply chains and extended supply chains – the whole of the circle – you will very quickly find efficiencies that you can start working on straight away… So it’s kind of like a three-step roadmap for each of the things that you’re looking at, so you can do your very quick efficiency, you can work out where the research needs to happen, and then you can move towards circularity, which is a much longerterm vision. And actually you can imagine the sort of investment that’s needed for companies to move to that place is quite big, but interestingly they’re the ones that are pushing this agenda.”

And indeed it is notable that large corporations are driving forward this idea – the Circular Economy Task Force works with many large businesses, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation has its Circular Economy 100, a ‘network of 100 leading companies globally to facilitate development and commitment to new circular economy projects’, and so on. I ask Hill what the advantages are to working with large companies, rather, than, say, mandating a circular economy through government policies, and she explains: “In thinking about circularity, it will inevitably gravitate towards large companies because they’re the ones that have the supply chain power… They would have the muscle to say, ‘Okay, we want to do this differently now and we want the rest of you to fall into line.’ At the end of the day, it’s the bulk movements that count, and the bulk movements tend to be in the hands of the big players.”

But others aren’t sure if large businesses, especially those with vested interests in getting us to consume as much as possible, can ever take us as far as we need to go in terms of circularity and resource security. Indeed, a recent book published by MIT Press, Eco-Business: A Big-Brand Takeover of Sustainability (reviewed on page 37), argues that ‘Eco-business is fundamentally aiming for sustainability of big business, not sustainability of people and planet… on its own [it] cannot – and never will – alter the underlying logic of accelerating consumerism and unequal globalisation behind the increasing power of big brands.’

Echoing these sentiments, Richard Hawkins, Director of the Public Interest Research Centre, says of large businesses’ involvement: “It makes sense from their point of view, because it’s as far as they can go within their own business models and those of many other companies. So it’s sort of enlightened from their point of view, but the problem is that’s a narrower point of view than is going to be required to solve all the environmental and social problems.”

Indeed, there’s a risk that our enthrallment with the idea of ‘circularity’ could mean we see it as a sort of panacea that means we don’t have to look at larger issues to do with consumption, just as the term ‘sustainable development’ can lull us into a sense that we can go on growing in a world of finite resources; Hawkins explains: “Even if you were to move to a zero waste economy, you’d still be using resources somewhere, and you’re still producing carbon emissions… You still have to look at consumption. If the overall consumption is increasing in a circular economy, then it will still need to be reducing per unit the resources and the emissions that it’s producing. So, there’s still that potential problem. My understanding is the circular economy is a necessary component, but it’s not sufficient.”

(That being said, Hawkins does commend the large businesses that are currently driving the agenda: “It’s better than being in complete denial about the need to reduce resource throughput and consumption, so in my view a lot of companies in that position make it more possible for others outside the corporate world to make the case for more of a proper regulatory system and so on.”)

Everyone seems to agree that there is, of course, a role for policymakers to take in shaping this agenda, with even Resource Minister Lord de Mauley admitting (rather non-committally) at CIWM: “Government can set conditions… but a truly circular economy relies on everybody playing their part.” Suggestions for policymaker input include new green taxes, VAT exemptions for servicing and repairs, and further development of quality standards. And governments, it seems, are increasingly taking notice of the ‘resource’ issue, with both the UK and EU governments, for instance, recently publishing resource security plans.

Unfortunately, concern with resource security could easily drive some countries (or businesses for that matter) in the exact opposite direction of circularity: towards land grabs and increasingly unsustainable extraction of resources. I put this conundrum to Hill, and she notes: “Well, all those options are open, and what counts in the end is where people invest their money in developing more secure resources, whether the more secure resources involve, as you say, expanding primary extraction in different ways, or they involve enhancing secondary use, which is what we’re talking about with circularity, or they involve substitution… it may be that the financial institutions will be able to take a view of risk that the circular and the secondary resources are going to be more resilient than any amount of expanding primary production because eventually we’ll still have the same problem.”

This will only work with far-sighted investment, of course, as Hill explains: “If you take shale gas as the ultimate example – it is a new primary source, everyone thinks it’s both cheap and accessible, it does the job in the medium term, and the fact is that most investments work in the short to medium term. It doesn’t think about the long term, and it hasn’t internalised the environmental costs.”

That being said, Hill also notes: “The chances with some of these metal resources of finding new, huge deposits, I would have thought were less”, adding that when it comes to achieving security for different resources “it’s not simple – it’s not generalisable”.

All of which illustrates just what a monumental and complex task bringing about a ‘circular economy’ will be. Still, as the saying goes: admitting you have a problem is the first step to recovery. Here’s hoping!